Welcome

Musings, rants and raves on the world of shopping carts and e-commerce, fortified with related business, legal and economic news, as well as announcements about my work on Zen Cart. Brought to you by That Software Guy.

Category: Widgets

As I said in my last post, I am a huge fan of utilities that let non-software-developers (i.e. “the ungeeked”) create a revenue stream from their website or blog. I like the idea of WidgetBucks, and I like the idea of Lemonade (they’re a bit different – WidgetBucks selects products based on page analysis, where as Lemonade lets you choose your favorite products). The Varien guys were negative on Lemonade because of poor product choices, but this has to be something that they’re working on. I think that for people who don’t want a cart or an Amazon store, simple options like this – used in moderation – could be a successful monetization mechanism. We’ll see.

I really like the idea of easy to use and install widgets that can be dropped on to a website. Widgizit has created an excellent one for Amazon. Others are available at WidgetBox.com. I’ll be interested to see if smaller carts will start creating things like this for their vendors – it’s not hard to do, but it’s a lot more work to make it as elegant as Widgizit did.